Essays Of The Human Condition

People saw the outcome. The missed deadline. The unpaid bill. The unfinished form. They didn’t see the dozen small collisions that happened before it. A task would enter my mind, bright and urgent, then another thought would slide in beside it. The first thought would remain somewhere, technically present, but unreachable. I could feel responsible for it without being able to find it.

That kind of living makes identity slippery. We tend to think of identity as something solid, a name carved into a door. I had imagined myself as organised, reliable, capable. Those words were not always true, but they were part of the person I believed I was trying to be. Then ADHD kept handing me evidence from the other side. The calendar said careless. The kitchen said distracted. The bank account said overwhelmed. My intentions told one story, while my visible life told another.

There is a particular shame in knowing you care and still not managing to behave as though you care. It’s hard to explain that a forgotten appointment wasn’t forgotten because it didn’t matter. Sometimes it was forgotten because it mattered so much that the thought of it became too large, and my mind escaped through a side door. Sometimes the task was boring. Sometimes it was frightening. Sometimes I was already carrying too many invisible things, and one more slipped from my hands.

Then the hormones began changing the weather.

Menopause did not arrive with a neat announcement. It came as a series of odd disturbances. Sleep became unreliable. My body warmed itself at three in the morning as if someone had left an oven door open. Words vanished in ordinary conversation. I’d be telling a story and lose the name of a town I had visited three times. I could see the place clearly: the narrow street, the red awning, the smell of bread. The name would not come.

I started describing this as “my brain being broken,” usually with a laugh. The laugh helped other people feel less uncomfortable. It also helped me avoid admitting how frightened I was.

Hormonal change can blur the edges of a person who has spent decades using competence as proof of worth. If I could remember, organise, produce, respond, and keep the household moving, I felt like myself. When those abilities became uneven, I didn’t simply lose efficiency. I lost a familiar route back to my own reflection.

The same thing happened with emotion. Anger arrived quickly, sometimes before I knew what had happened. A harmless question could feel like an accusation. A late delivery could become evidence that the whole world was conspiring to make my life harder. Then, ten minutes later, I would be standing in the kitchen wondering who had borrowed my body and used it to speak.

This is where trauma complicates the picture. The past doesn’t always stay in the past just because the calendar insists it should. A slammed door, a certain tone of voice, a smell of disinfectant, and suddenly the present has been crowded out. The body reacts before the mind has finished identifying the danger. I might know, intellectually, that I am safe. My shoulders don’t know. My stomach doesn’t know. My breathing certainly doesn’t know.

When ADHD, hormonal change, and trauma overlap, the question of choice becomes murky. Not impossible. Not erased. Murky.

That was the part I resisted.

I wanted a clean explanation. I wanted to know whether I was distracted, exhausted, frightened, angry, hormonal, or simply failing to manage myself. I wanted each difficulty to have one owner. Instead, they arrived together, passing the parcel between them. Poor sleep made attention worse. Poor attention created mistakes. Mistakes stirred old shame. Shame sharpened my reactions. Stress disrupted sleep. Around and around it went, a small household storm with no obvious beginning.

Before I made a decision, something had often already happened inside me. My nervous system had assessed the room. My attention had selected a different fire. My hormones had lowered the threshold between irritation and eruption. My history had filled a neutral moment with old meaning.

And yet the world judged the final act.

It judged the email sent too quickly, not the night of broken sleep before it. It judged the appointment missed, not the crowded mind that had misplaced it. It judged the withdrawal, not the exhaustion of explaining why ordinary tasks had begun to feel like negotiations with an invisible customs officer.

I’m not saying choices don’t matter. They do. I have hurt people while overwhelmed. I have spoken sharply, avoided necessary conversations, spent money I should have kept, and called it impulse when fear was sitting underneath. Understanding the forces at work does not turn every consequence into someone else’s responsibility.

But responsibility becomes more honest when it includes the conditions under which a choice was made.

There is a difference between saying, “I am a careless person,” and saying, “My attention, sleep, hormones, and old alarms are interfering with the person I mean to be.” The first is a verdict. The second is information. It doesn’t excuse the missed call or the cruel sentence. It does, however, make room for the truth that behaviour can be real without being the whole self.

That morning, I eventually found a shirt. It was inside the laundry basket, clean but wrinkled, which seemed about right. I drank the cold tea because making another cup felt like an unnecessary test of character. Then I stood in front of the mirror again, still with one earring, and tried to remember what I had wanted to say at the appointment.

I remembered in fragments. I wanted to talk about the sleep. The fog. The sudden anger. The old memories that had begun surfacing in ordinary places. I wanted to say that I didn’t feel like myself, though I wasn’t sure which self I meant. The woman before the symptoms? The woman before the trauma? The woman before she learned to hide every difficulty behind competence?

Perhaps identity is not the unbroken certainty I had imagined. Perhaps it is also the thread we keep trying to locate when the room has gone dark. That morning, with my cold tea and wet hair, I did not find a complete answer. I found something smaller and more useful: the knowledge that being blurred is not the same as being gone.

The face in the mirror was still mine, even when I had to look twice.

End of chapter one. 14 more chapters and about 22,250 words in the full book.